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Certainly not meaning "G" for "God", as I acknowledge Jesus Christ to be God. Maybe vs. the "Gospel critics"? Such as Gallio, quite active lately here in "The Historical Jesus"? In any case I need to start a new thread, as Gallio at least seems to be so well-informed and carefully scholarly in what he writes that I find no easy starting point against him.
I thought the polite thing to do was to send a message to Gallio and ask him to study my writings I present here so we can discuss them. But I could not find the usual way here at CF to contact him. He was last active on March 17th. Has he since resigned? Or been banned?
Whatever, I'm not trying to refute the detailed scholarship Gallio presented, but to take a fresh look at the evidence.
Never just assuming the consensus to be right (or wrong), I investigated the gospels to find out what the texts themselves say about their origin. Four of my articles are accessible on the internet at MegaSociety.org in the Noesis volume #181 (June 2006 Special Biblical Scholarship Issue). In all I find that the dates for all the gospels are earlier than usually stated, thus providing good evidence for the usual Christian beliefs about Jesus Christ. Here's a portion of what I published:
Common Sense Gospel Study
The four Gospels and Acts can be shown by simple common sense to be very early in date. Putting aside a priori theology that Christ is God on the one hand, or on the other hand historical method that proceeds as if supernatural events cannot happen, let’s see what the texts themselves show.
The proper starting point is the Gospel of Luke and its continuation, The Acts of the Apostles. In the second half of the latter, the author at times slips into “we” (or “us” or “our”
sayings that indicate he was with Paul of Tarsus during the latter’s missionary journeys. These three passages are Acts 16:10-17; 20:5-21:18, and 27:1-28:16. At the conclusion of these, Paul is still alive and in Rome, which can be dated by reference to Paul’s epistles in the New Testament to be about 64 A.D. The most sensible date for the Gospel of Luke and its complementary Acts is thus 64 A.D. The author (presumably Luke) could have written this much later in his life, but it would by common sense analysis still be early.
The Lucan author employed sources, as he himself tells us in Luke 1:1-4. These would necessarily have been earlier. At least one source bears some connection to the apostle Peter, whose name appears frequently in the Gospels and in the first fifteen chapters of Acts. The mention in Acts 15:7-11 occurs in the context of Acts chapters 13 to 28 that focus on Paul, so the source connected with Peter seems to end at Acts 12:19. The death of King Herod Agrippa I (12:23) sets the date at 44 A.D. This likely sets the date of the writing of the source and also establishes the likely author, as this is when Peter “went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark.” Church tradition also supports this logic, that Peter’s scribe was Mark, and critical scholarship calls this source “Ur-Marcus.” It would have been as well titled “Ur-Lucas” to acknowledge that it underlies not just the Gospel of Mark, not just the Gospel of Luke, but also the Acts also written by the writer of Luke.
The earliest version of this Ur-Marcus was evidently written in Aramaic and included at least the Passion Narrative and the Feeding of the 5,000, as these are recounted in all four of the canonical Gospels. The composition of the Fourth Gospel, John, seems best regarded as having been rotated in composition among a team of the apostles, making an early date sensible for it as well.
Peter (after Jesus, of course) is the focus of the Ur-Marcus Aramaic draft, but his name is primary in many other passages of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) as well. Verbal identities in the Greek among these passages between the Gospels of Mark and Luke establish that this second (?) draft should be called Greek Ur-Marcus. This stage of the collaboration between the men Peter and Mark would thus be most likely not long after 44 A.D.
The Gospel of Luke is widely regarded by critical scholars as containing a source we call “Q.” Simply by comparing Luke with the Gospel of Matthew, anyone can see for himself that they share a large body of text in common that is not found in Mark. However, it is over-simplifying to hold that all this common material traces back to a common source, Q, and that no other sayings are from Q. The true-blue Q sayings are not verbally exact between Matthew and Luke. Any verses that are verbally exact were copied into Matthew from Luke and are not likely from Q. These are found largely in Matthew chapters 23 and 24, particularly 23:23 to 23:39 and 24:26 to 24:51. This shows that Matthew was written later than Luke, but still was most likely complete by 70 A.D., as it does not mention the Fall of Jerusalem in that year.
One commonly hears that there are no Q passages in the Gospel of Mark. This is incorrect. The discovery of the complete text of the Gospel of Thomas at Nag Hammadi in 1946 revealed sayings in it that are in Mark, and not just from Matthew and Luke. Although this could mean that the text of Thomas was based on the completed Synoptic Gospels, close study shows that it is more likely that the parts of Thomas that overlap the canonical Gospels are based on a source text they share in common, namely Q or some variant thereof. Unless the writer of Thomas also had access to Ur-Marcus, this shows that Thomas picked up some of the same parables from Q that Mark included. It thus seems that Ur-Marcus was almost completely narrative text with even fewer sayings than we commonly attribute to Mark.
The Q Source could have been written very early. It was written in Aramaic, judging by the sections that Mark and Luke have in common that lack verbal exactitude. The word “Twelve” (meaning the 12 Apostles) appears so often in this that it is commonly called the Twelve-Source. The name Matthew (or Levi) occurs where this text begins (as at Luke 5:27), and early external tradition names the writer as this Matthew, so this material could have been from an eye-witness or could even have been first put in writing during the lifetime of Jesus.
Late dates for the Gospels have not disappeared from scholarship, as seen in Burton Mack. However, the more fashionable tendency has been toward early dating. No one has stepped forward to prove wrong the early dating reached by the liberal Anglican Bishop John A. T. Robinson. In Redating the New Testament (1976, pp 352-354) he gave approximate dates for all four Gospels as between 40 and 65 A.D.
[End of quotation from my article in pg. 7-11 in Noesis #181]
I thought the polite thing to do was to send a message to Gallio and ask him to study my writings I present here so we can discuss them. But I could not find the usual way here at CF to contact him. He was last active on March 17th. Has he since resigned? Or been banned?
Whatever, I'm not trying to refute the detailed scholarship Gallio presented, but to take a fresh look at the evidence.
Never just assuming the consensus to be right (or wrong), I investigated the gospels to find out what the texts themselves say about their origin. Four of my articles are accessible on the internet at MegaSociety.org in the Noesis volume #181 (June 2006 Special Biblical Scholarship Issue). In all I find that the dates for all the gospels are earlier than usually stated, thus providing good evidence for the usual Christian beliefs about Jesus Christ. Here's a portion of what I published:
Common Sense Gospel Study
Dale Adams
The four Gospels and Acts can be shown by simple common sense to be very early in date. Putting aside a priori theology that Christ is God on the one hand, or on the other hand historical method that proceeds as if supernatural events cannot happen, let’s see what the texts themselves show.
The proper starting point is the Gospel of Luke and its continuation, The Acts of the Apostles. In the second half of the latter, the author at times slips into “we” (or “us” or “our”
sayings that indicate he was with Paul of Tarsus during the latter’s missionary journeys. These three passages are Acts 16:10-17; 20:5-21:18, and 27:1-28:16. At the conclusion of these, Paul is still alive and in Rome, which can be dated by reference to Paul’s epistles in the New Testament to be about 64 A.D. The most sensible date for the Gospel of Luke and its complementary Acts is thus 64 A.D. The author (presumably Luke) could have written this much later in his life, but it would by common sense analysis still be early.The Lucan author employed sources, as he himself tells us in Luke 1:1-4. These would necessarily have been earlier. At least one source bears some connection to the apostle Peter, whose name appears frequently in the Gospels and in the first fifteen chapters of Acts. The mention in Acts 15:7-11 occurs in the context of Acts chapters 13 to 28 that focus on Paul, so the source connected with Peter seems to end at Acts 12:19. The death of King Herod Agrippa I (12:23) sets the date at 44 A.D. This likely sets the date of the writing of the source and also establishes the likely author, as this is when Peter “went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark.” Church tradition also supports this logic, that Peter’s scribe was Mark, and critical scholarship calls this source “Ur-Marcus.” It would have been as well titled “Ur-Lucas” to acknowledge that it underlies not just the Gospel of Mark, not just the Gospel of Luke, but also the Acts also written by the writer of Luke.
The earliest version of this Ur-Marcus was evidently written in Aramaic and included at least the Passion Narrative and the Feeding of the 5,000, as these are recounted in all four of the canonical Gospels. The composition of the Fourth Gospel, John, seems best regarded as having been rotated in composition among a team of the apostles, making an early date sensible for it as well.
Peter (after Jesus, of course) is the focus of the Ur-Marcus Aramaic draft, but his name is primary in many other passages of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) as well. Verbal identities in the Greek among these passages between the Gospels of Mark and Luke establish that this second (?) draft should be called Greek Ur-Marcus. This stage of the collaboration between the men Peter and Mark would thus be most likely not long after 44 A.D.
The Gospel of Luke is widely regarded by critical scholars as containing a source we call “Q.” Simply by comparing Luke with the Gospel of Matthew, anyone can see for himself that they share a large body of text in common that is not found in Mark. However, it is over-simplifying to hold that all this common material traces back to a common source, Q, and that no other sayings are from Q. The true-blue Q sayings are not verbally exact between Matthew and Luke. Any verses that are verbally exact were copied into Matthew from Luke and are not likely from Q. These are found largely in Matthew chapters 23 and 24, particularly 23:23 to 23:39 and 24:26 to 24:51. This shows that Matthew was written later than Luke, but still was most likely complete by 70 A.D., as it does not mention the Fall of Jerusalem in that year.
One commonly hears that there are no Q passages in the Gospel of Mark. This is incorrect. The discovery of the complete text of the Gospel of Thomas at Nag Hammadi in 1946 revealed sayings in it that are in Mark, and not just from Matthew and Luke. Although this could mean that the text of Thomas was based on the completed Synoptic Gospels, close study shows that it is more likely that the parts of Thomas that overlap the canonical Gospels are based on a source text they share in common, namely Q or some variant thereof. Unless the writer of Thomas also had access to Ur-Marcus, this shows that Thomas picked up some of the same parables from Q that Mark included. It thus seems that Ur-Marcus was almost completely narrative text with even fewer sayings than we commonly attribute to Mark.
The Q Source could have been written very early. It was written in Aramaic, judging by the sections that Mark and Luke have in common that lack verbal exactitude. The word “Twelve” (meaning the 12 Apostles) appears so often in this that it is commonly called the Twelve-Source. The name Matthew (or Levi) occurs where this text begins (as at Luke 5:27), and early external tradition names the writer as this Matthew, so this material could have been from an eye-witness or could even have been first put in writing during the lifetime of Jesus.
Late dates for the Gospels have not disappeared from scholarship, as seen in Burton Mack. However, the more fashionable tendency has been toward early dating. No one has stepped forward to prove wrong the early dating reached by the liberal Anglican Bishop John A. T. Robinson. In Redating the New Testament (1976, pp 352-354) he gave approximate dates for all four Gospels as between 40 and 65 A.D.
[End of quotation from my article in pg. 7-11 in Noesis #181]
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